The purpose of this essay is to study uses of history in a complementary teaching material in the subject of history. The material in question is a 170 page book titled Hitler och Stalin- En bok om ondska. In English, ?Hitler and Stalin- A book on evil?. Essential to the study is that it is expressed within the material that it might be used as the basis for a discussion of the threats against an open democratic society.

In this Bachelor thesis I am going to look at attitudes towards political violence in a small town in Sweden in the 1920s. The town I have picked for this study is Kalmar situated on the east coast of Sweden. This study is a micro historic case study. The specific case is a strike at the city?s water and gas plants for higher salary.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the political ambitions regarding culture inVärmland, and the situation for artists living on the countryside in Värmland. This meansthat the conditions surronding the artists situation will be looked upon. I have chosen thepolitical document Kulturplanen, created by Region Värmland, as my guideline to whatkind of political view there is on art and cultures role in the region. Furthermore, I havechosen Pierre Bourdieu`s theory about art as a field controlled by and under the influenceof different rules within the filed itself and what or whom has the power to act and be apart of the filed. I also use interviews as my method for this study.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine how the president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, is described in Swedish mass media. The research question of the paper is "How was president Hugo Chávez portrayed in Swedish newspapers in the 2004 Venezuelan referendum?". The answer of this question provides information about how the mass media form the image of current political events which is an important aspect of power. The applied method and theory in the study is the critical discourse analysis.

The aim of this Masters thesis is to examine the view of market-led culture, focusing on literature, within Swedish governmental cultural policy. The main issue is to discover changes in attitude towards cooperation between culture and business by comparing the attitudes and ideas expressed in the governmental policy documents from the 1970s with the governmental policy documents from the 1990s. To illuminate, and with an effort to explain, these attitudes and ideas expressed in the documents their political and social context has been studied as well. The theoretical starting point is two political ideologies, and Danish cultural policy researcher Dorte Skot-Hansens theories of cultural policy in the Nordic countries. The methodological starting point is two variants of analyses that are textual ones.

Studies have found that the applicability of commercial marketing strategies within politics have increased in recent years as a result of a rising number of swing voters. The purpose of this paper was to investigate the effects of the commercial theory of incongruent information in political marketing in Sweden. Subsequently, an experiment with 742 participants was conducted, testing the effects of congruent and incongruent ad messages for two established Swedish parties. The effect of ad message choice on several well-established measures of ad effectiveness such as awareness, credibility, attitude, conviction and voting intentions was analyzed. The results showed that incongruent information effectively increases attitude, conviction and voting intention for voters who decide on the election day what party to vote for.

AbstractHomosexuality is surely accepted in today´s society - or isn´t it? Many things have changed, for instance laws, which are in favour for homosexuals, have been introduced, in Sweden that is. As we although know, many things are not only dependent on what laws tell us to do. The society also contains values and norms and they furthermore exist in individuals. Regarding sexuality, the norm is heterosexuality.How much does the norm affect our way of living? In what way is it encouraged? What happens to people who don´t live up to the norm? How is it to be homosexual in today´s society? These are some of the questions that we look upon in this paper.

The aim of this study was to examine how women in a voluntary organization, KRIS (C.R.I.S. Criminals' Return Into Society) express their experience of help and support from voluntary and professional organized social work. This was an empirically based study with, qualitative approach. The methods of data collection were unstructured interviews and participant observation.The central question was which importance KRIS possible may have in the process of the women's return into society from involvement in crime and drug abuse. What can KRIS offer that the professional organization can't?The findings were that mutuality, mutual aid or mutual help based on shared experiences is hard to replace with support from professional organized social work.

This study aims to analyze how the two Swedish political parties, The Social Democrats and The Moderates, justify their stance on the euro regarding two motivational factors, voter-based ones and parliamentary ones. Since the referendum in 2003 resulted in a clear no amongst the Swedish voters, the political debate surrounding the euro has in many regards disappeared from the broader Swedish political climate, yet the expectations that Sweden faces from the European Union to adopt the euro remains. The EU-membership entails legal obligation to comply with the larger economic integration within the EU where the collective currency of the euro is an important factor. The study is conducted using the qualitative method of motivational analysis to examine the extent of which voter-based motivations and parliamentary motivations are used by the two political parties to justify their continued inactivity on the euro question. The underlying sources of information were made up of sources such as parliamentary and governmental documents, interviews with central figures throughout the years 2003-2025, and other relevant material.

As EU?s authority increased the number of lobbies in Brussels grew. Today there are approximately 15 000 lobbyists in Brussels. EU decisions and EU directives can have a huge impact on companies and organizations. They can however influence these decisions and directives through lobbying.

On the 17th of January 2002 the Swedish government presented a bill to theSwedish parliament, proposing ways of strengthening the Swedish democracythrough reforms for increased elements of participatory democracy. A publicreport on the state of the Swedish democracy had been released two years earlierwith similar enthusiasm for participatory democracy. However, the participatoryideals of these two documents were strongly criticised by a group of scholars.The aim of this thesis is to analyze and compare the arguments articulatedbetween the years 2000 and 2002 by the actors mentioned above, and to examinetheir relation to arguments concerning political participation, articulated bythinkers from previous times. By classifying the arguments into different groupsdepending on their content I find that both parties in the Swedish argumentationfocus on the effects of participatory democracy on political equality, on theefficiency of the political decision-making and the quality of the decisions beingmade, and finally on the personal character of the citizens. Among the argumentsarticulated by thinkers from previous times, similarities with the Swedishargumentation can be seen as well as important differences.

The concept of sustainable development is a challenge that demands cooperation from all levels of society for it to be successful. The focus for this thesis is how politicians within the local councils understand the concept of sustainable development and how they implement it in political decision-making.The basis for the study is a questionnaire that was distributed to 303 local politicians in three municipalities of varying size in Southern Sweden. The study concentrates on departments within the local councils that are directly connected to the Swedish environmental law and the Swedish planning and construction law. One of the primary goals with the aforementioned laws is the achievement of sustainable development within one generation.The outcome of the study was that over half of the local politicians could correctly define sustainable development according to the World Commission on Environment and Development?s (WCED) definition.

This thesis aims at studying representatives from three groups in the Egyptian society with an ethnographic method and with regards to their experiences, reflections and stories of the Egyptian revolution. The material of the thesis is based on ethnographic fieldwork and on interviews.The purpose of the study is to explore different themes in the informants? stories related to society, freedom, social justice, human values, peace and civility. The purpose is also to examine the informants' stories with emphasis on various informal learning processes that occurred in the Egyptian social change.The study finds that according to the informants a society should be characterized, among other things, by human values, social justice, non-violence and peaceful methods and approaches. Various informal learning processes involving both individual citizens and active members of civil society and NGO groups were found to be practiced to be able to accomplish these changes in the Egyptian society to create a better future.The degrees of involvement of the various learning processes not only reflect differences between informants regarding the social and cultural background.

This study was made in collaboration between Umeå University and Västerbotten sportsfederation. The study was aimed to find out how the municipalities are working with variousissues in the sports field. A subject of interest for this study was to see if the municipalitieswere implementing strategies in the sports field on determined goals by using policydocuments. Our study focused mostly on kids and youth that participate in organized sports inVästerbotten. Other aspects of interest in the study were economics in sports, how youthsports should be organized, and segregation in sports due to financial factors.

This essay is a comparative research between pupils' experience of how the headmaster, teachers and other school staff interpret and apply the democratic education. The results are based on a survey carried out in senior high school, as well as interviews with the school staff. The democratic education charge has a long history of Swedish school system and is the basis for the maintenance of a democratic society. Both policy paper of state investigations and researchers in the field, regard to school as the primary and unique instance in order to promote and develop democratic skills in children and young people. However, it is shown that those who come out from school lack of knowledge and awareness of democracy and the will to speak their mind.